about the Qur’ân and the Qur’ânic wahy with much offensive disparagement. More significantly, it was about this time that the Italian orientalist Prince Leon Caetani’s monumental work, Annalli dell’ Islam, began to appear. Its first volume was published in 1904 in Milan, and its tenth and final volume came out in 1926. In its seventh volume Caetani dealt elaborately with the Qur’ân. Discussing the views, among others, of N?ldeke and building upon his conclusions Caetani drove at three assumptions, namely, (a) that the Qur’ân does not represent the very words (ipissima verba) of Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) , (b) that the tradition about the first collection (Caetani uses the expression recencio = recension, a critical revision of a text) of the Qur’ân during the time of Abû Bakr (رضي الله عنه) is a myth and (c) that the recencio during ‘Uthmân’s (رضي الله عنه) time was undertaken more for political than for religious motives. A summarised English translation of these views was published shortly afterwards in The Moslem World in 1915. (1) It needs to be pointed out that Caetani is very much wrong in these assumptions. He betrays the misconception of the orientalists in general that the Qur’ân is made up of the Prophet’s verba (words).

Meanwhile Ignaz Goldziher (1850 - 1921), whose work, Muhammedanische Studien (Studies on Islam) in two volumes and published from Halle in 1889 - 1890 had established him as an authority on the history of the hadîth literature (2) , turned his attention to Qur’ânic studies. In 1910 the first volume of his lectures on Islam was published. In this volume he discussed, among other things, the concept of "Predestination and Free will" in the Qur’ân. And in the second volume of this work, which was published in 1920, he dealt elaborately with the history and development of Qur’ân commentaries (tafâsîr).